Israel’s post-Gaza bombing assault on Black history and identities

The term racism, used to describe what is experienced by Black groups, has a very specific meaning. It has replaced words such as bias, prejudice, and bigotry to point more precisely to the structural condition of the Black experience—a people who were once owned and colonized; whose original lands, culture, languages, and more were taken by force; and who, in modern society, have little or no collective institutional or financial power to combat their ghettoization in, predominantly, the lower reaches of Western class systems.¹

To continue the marginalization of Black and, more recently, Muslim groups, you do not have to suddenly turn society upside down or challenge the dominant religious white or secular culture, or even, as in Nazi Germany, change citizenship and property ownership rules—in contrast to periodic historic assaults on certain white ethno-religious groups, who, by comparison, have sometimes enjoyed bourgeois, socioeconomic class power. In this respect, in the binary terms of oppressor/oppressed, Black people, unlike white ethnic groups, most often do not have the choice or structural reality to be the former.

Illustrative of this comparison is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr leading a rent strike against exploitative white ethnic Jewish landlords in 1966 Chicago. Dr. King summarized this difficult reality thus:

The urban Negro has a special and unique relationship to Jews. He meets them in two dissimilar roles. On the one hand, he is associated with Jews as some of his most committed and generous partners in the civil rights struggle. On the other hand, he meets them daily as some of his most direct exploiters in the ghetto as slum landlords and gouging shopkeepers. Jews have identified with Negroes voluntarily in the freedom movement, motivated by their religious and cultural commitment to justice. The other Jews who are engaged in commerce in the ghettos are remnants of older communities. A great number of Negro ghettos were formerly Jewish neighborhoods; some storekeepers and landlords remained as population changes occurred. They operate with the ethics of marginal business entrepreneurs, not Jewish ethics, but the distinction is lost on some Negroes who are maltreated by them.²

Two years prior to this, in 1964, Malcolm X made a similar clarification of this type of experience, stating in conversation with Monthly Review that “this doesn’t mean that we are anti-Jews or anti-Semitic—we are anti-exploitation.”³

The same year, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman gave their lives in Mississippi, where they were killed alongside African-American voter registration activist James Chaney. Schwerner and Goodman were Jewish and had travelled a long way from home to make this sacrifice for Black civil rights.⁴ These very differing accounts of exploitation versus altruistic solidarity, however, are not representative of some sort of sociological incoherence within white Western Jewish populations, but rather indicative that economic abuse and oppression can be options for those who are relatively advantageously positioned within capitalism and its societal and colonial hierarchies.

In summer 2014, between July 7 and August 26, Israel bombarded Gaza with “6,000 airstrikes, 14,500 tank shells and 45,000 artillery shells.” According to these UN figures, Israel killed 551 children, out of a total death toll of 2,252 Palestinians.⁵ Since then, Israel, aided by well-funded allies in the corporate media, has engaged in a continuous high-profile moral panic about anti-Semitism in Britain and other Western societies, clearly designed to obscure and overwrite its own offences. Indicative of the dual trends that Dr. King identified, many of the initial victims of the moral panic were courageous antiracist Jewish critics of well-documented apartheid Israel—including Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Jewish Voices for Labour, Jewdas, the academic Norman Finkelstein, journalist Max Blumenthal, members of Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi of Free Speech on Israel, pro-Palestinian activist Tony Greenstein, and the list is ever growing.⁶

Perhaps more significant has been the attack on prominent Black figures and organizations. Even prior to the 2014 moral panic, Nelson Mandela had been pejoratively labelled “an enabler of anti-Semitism.”⁷ This despite the fact that the African National Congress under Mandela relied on strategic Jewish resistance and, more significantly, subsequently built South Africa’s new Constitutional Court around members of the white Jewish legal team who had defended Mandela on capital charges under apartheid.⁸

Another Black Nobel Peace Prize winner and long-term critic of Israeli apartheid, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has also been regularly smeared, as were Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X.⁹ To these names we can add Jackie Walker, Malia Bouattia, and campaigner Marc Wadsworth—the latter a Black activist in the historic Stephen Lawrence racist killing case.¹⁰ U.S. senators Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley have faced similar attacks.¹¹ Black academic Marc Lamont Hill was sacked by CNN because his advocacy for Palestinians was spun as anti-Semitism.¹² Attempts were made to “rescind” a Civil Rights Award to academic and former 1960s radical icon Angela Davis, again on the basis of historic critiques of Israel and support for Palestinians.¹³ Blumenthal has also raised the issues of Israel’s attack on the Black Lives Matter movement due its shared empathy with Palestinian persecution.¹⁴

Given the original definition of racism, how are Black and Indigenous peoples remotely structurally positioned to racially oppress specific white ethnic groups? In fact, their very vulnerability to public and institutionalized attacks suggests otherwise. In many of these examples, the interests of an external well-documented apartheid state are even put before the internal democratic rights of Black citizens in their own countries. Incredibly, some Washington journalists would sooner defend a foreign country rather than their fellow Black citizens being killed on the streets.¹⁵

Smearing Black and Indigenous People as Racist

When Indigenous people dispute Israel’s white settlers claim to Palestinian land, it is the occupying Zionists who are spun as the victims of the supposed “racism” of Native peoples—a key pillar of Israel’s ideology, supported by the global corporate media. When Black critics dispute Israel’s white Western supporters, they are deemed—against all logic—racist against whites. Yet, despite claims of anti-Semitism, the religion of the oppressor is hardly the issue for Black and Indigenous groups. Israel’s attacks on Black and Indigenous (Palestinian) constituencies have thus not been a haphazard public relations strategy, but have functioned to create a hierarchy of victimhood, with Israel and its supporters at the top. Where they are inconvenient to this hierarchy of victimhood, the Black experience of racism, Black history, the right to express these and even the complexities of Black diasporic identity are willfully and brutally expunged from the consciousness of corporate media representation.

After the 2014 Gaza bombing, Israel and its corporate media allies smeared large parts of the UK Labour Party, apparently fearing the return of its traditional antiracist, anti-imperialist, anticolonial politics. Marc Wadsworth and Jackie Walker were two Black activists subjected to the resulting pro-Israel anti-Semitism moral panic, which resulted in an internal “inquiry into anti-Semitism and other forms of racism in the Labour Party,” researched by lawyer Shami Chakrabarti.

Marc Wadsworth

At the launch of the report, human rights activist and then Labour Party-supporting Black journalist Marc Wadsworth spotted right-wing pro-Israel Labour member of parliament Ruth Smeeth working alongside a journalist from the Daily Telegraph—a Tory supporting paper at the forefront of the moral panic.¹⁶ Previously, union leader Len McClusky and Jewish activist Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi had been critical of neoliberal Labour collusion with the whipped up fervor. Supporting this analysis, and as one of the few Black minority Britons in the room, Wadsworth stated:

I saw that the Telegraph handed a copy of a press release to Ruth Smeeth MP so you can see who is working hand in hand. If you look around this room, how many African Caribbean and Asian people are there? We need to get our house in order.¹⁷

On the basis of this statement and with little relevance to what had been stated, Smeeth accused Wadsworth of “vile conspiracy theories about Jewish people,” suggesting that he had articulated or implied a traditional Jewish media conspiracy narrative.¹⁸ Avoiding any cross-examination, Smeeth then stormed out, followed by the entire press corps who treated her theatrical accusation as a reality.

Smeeth’s blatantly performative allegation about Wadsworth made no rational sense. The Daily Telegraph and its management group were owned by the Scottish Catholic Barclay brothers. Before that, the owner was Conrad Black, who converted from Protestantism to Catholicism—so, no Jewish connection.

Similarly, Wadsworth’s complaint about Black identity and representation is entirely apt when compared to the British census of 2011. According to the census, British Jews make up 0.5 percent of the population (1 in every 200 people); Black groups 3 percent; mixed-race groups 2 percent; and Asian groups together roughly 7 percent–adding up to a total 12 percent of the population.¹⁹ Put simply, for every Ruth Smeeth in the room, there should have been twenty-four Black minority group Britons. Wadsworth was a physical embodiment of the structural nature of British racism, even as his “talking back” was smeared for supposedly oppressing a more privileged member of a white ethnic group.

Subsequently, the entire British media pretended Wadsworth was possibly an “extremist” Corbyn-type supporter and absented his antiracist history. His activism, including supportively introducing the parents of murdered Black teenager Steven Lawrence to Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, was censored by news outlets that had previously covered his human rights work, such as the BBC, Independent, (which had featured him three times prior), and Guardian (for whom he contributed columns).²⁰ Wadsworth was expelled from Labour—not for anti-Semitism, which clearly could not be proven, but for bringing the Party into disrepute.²¹

Jackie Walker

Jackie Walker is a Black Jamaican-British antiracist and pro-Palestinian activist. She is also Jewish. In 2016, she attended a Labour Party Conference fringe anti-Semitism training day event, where the issue of linking criticism of Israel to anti-Semitism was being contested. She tried to raise the issue of the victims of the transatlantic slave trade who were absented from Holocaust Memorial Day and the implicit hierarchies of victimhood built into the Memorial Day institution. Walker was shouted down by members of the right-wing pro-Israel “Jewish Labour Movement”²² when she said:

I came in here… looking for information and I still haven’t heard a definition of anti-Semitism that I can work with.… [shouting from audience] And in terms of Holocaust Day, wouldn’t it be wonderful if Holocaust Day was open to all people who experienced Holocaust.… In practice, it’s not actually circulated and advertised as such.²³

Walker suffered repeated aggressive attempts to deflect the issue. She eventually offered clarification that she was referring directly to the slave trade and the issues of white privileging hierarchies of victimhood. Significantly, reference to Holocaust Memorial Day’s scandalous absenting of victims of slavery and the Black holocausts of the Western white imperialist tradition—of which Israel is the latest colonial manifestation—was censored, and continues to be, from all UK reporting. In subsequent coverage, Black Holocaust denial was actually a feature of an infamous interview on September 29, 2016, with Jackie Walker by UK Ch4 TV News’s Cathy Newman. In actual fact, a figure of “60 million and more” victims of the transatlantic slave trade has been accepted as standard for decades, as featured in the preface to Toni Morrison’s Beloved  and in Slavery Remembrance Day.²⁴

As a monolith, the media spun Walker’s qualifying comments about Jewish participation in the slave trade as a lie, and the worst of anti-Semitic slurs. Yet, illustrative of media hypocrisy, the Jewish Chronicle—that led the charge against Walker—a year after its strategic manufactured outrage, sent one of its female reporters, Harriet Green, to trace her roots in the former slave economy of Barbados. She wrote: “There’s a dark side to this.… It is estimated 387,000 Africans were shipped to the island against their will. To be perfectly clear: the wealth of the island (and perhaps my forebears) was a direct result of appalling suffering.”²⁵ Prior to the moral panic, the Huffington Post had commissioned a same themed article, on Jewish roots in the same former slave economy, from Alison Stein Wellner.²⁶

In contrast to the outraged strategic positioning of the Israel lobby, Pope John Paul II apologized for the Catholic Church’s role in slavery in 1985 and again in 1992.²⁷ The United Kingdom’s Arch-Bishop of Canterbury had, in 2006, apologized on behalf of the Protestant Church of England “for benefiting from the slave trade” and again in 2020.²⁸ The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, apologized in 1995 and admitted to a history of “slaveholding” and “deep racism” in 2018.²⁹

Stealing Black Experience

This moral panic has been eliminating the history and critical vocabulary that references Israel, its Zionist lobby, and racism. Mirroring this is also the appropriation of victim status and experience of the Black oppressed and, even unashamedly, its vocabulary and phrases. An old white exemption for racism against Black people—so old that it has adapted its terminology with the passing of generations—used to be: “I’m not racist some of my best friends are colored,” which changed to “I’m not racist some of my best friends are Negro,” which evolved over time to “I’m not racist some of my best friends are Black,” and now finally in the United States “I’m not racist some of my best friends are African American.”

Guardian opinion editor Jonathan Freedland took this expression and spun it for new younger readers as a uniquely a Jewish experience and phrase.³⁰ The sentiment “only Black people know what racism is”—sometimes expressed as “only Black people know what racism feels like”—was changed, for the purposes of advocating for Israel in a Guardian  column by Howard Jacobson, into “Jews know what anti-Semitism is and what it isn’t.”³¹ This phrasing was followed up in items selected for the letters page.³² Similarly, Jeremy Newmark of the entryist pro-Israel Jewish Labour Movement is alleged to have taken Malcolm X’s expressions house slave and house n*gg*r and rebranded them as court Jew, in reference to Jackie Walker.³³ Not only that, but they have also taken the ancient uppity n*gg*r slur and changed it for the purposes of the current pro-Zionist moral panic, into pushy Jew (bizarrely, despite “the timid Jew” being a historical racist stereotype).³⁴ Palestinians, who have long been saying that Israel has been naturalizing settler identities by rebranding Indigenous Palestinian cuisine as its own, may find these tactics familiar.

Individual Racism of the Lobby

Finally, there is the issue of the free pass on individual racism, given to those making Labour Party anti-Semitism accusations. The frequently quoted accusations by “comedian” David Baddiel of Labour anti-Semitism were media supported despite his invention of the slur pineappleheads to describe Black people wearing traditional “locks and cornrows.”³⁵ Baddiel had donned Black face as part of an infamous television series in which he ridiculed Black footballer Jason Lee on the basis of his ethnic appearance.³⁶ His incitements resulted in thousands at football stadiums racially abusing Lee and his family.³⁷

The Jewish Peer and entrepreneur Alan Sugar also made unsubstantiated complaints of Labour anti-Semitism. Yet, during the 2018 soccer world cup, he was outed for making traditional generic British “all darkies look the same”-type jokes about the Senegal football team. Sugar’s slur was reported internationally, even in the Washington Post and across the United States, publicly condemned by Senegalese officials, and his resignation demanded by the African Press.³⁸ Yet, his unsubstantiated pro-Israel anti-Semitism complaints remain media undented, as does his BBC his career.

Similarly, the UK Israel-supporting Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis champions the so-called Tebbit test for ethnic minorities, claiming that “minorities need to pass the Norman Tebbit test.”³⁹ The Tebbit test is a highly controversial and contested right-wing mechanism, condemned as racist, that suggests you can tell Black Britons are not really British by their “unpatriotic” support for foreign sports teams. By comparison, in the Chief Rabbi’s universe, equivalently questioning British white ethnic support for a foreign apartheid colonial state is anti-Semitism.

White Liverpool-born Jewish satirist Alexei Sayle, who had advocated on behalf of Jackie Walker and Labour Party figures like her, rightly concluded:

There can be no greater injustice than anti-racists being accused of racism by racists.⁴⁰

Afterword

The Labour Party has now suffered neoliberal capture. The socialist antiracist Jewish Voice for Labour says that “its members are 20 times more likely than non-Jewish Labour members to face antisemitism complaints… 53 percent of JVL [Jewish Voice for Labour] officers have faced actioned complaints of antisemitism, a rate 180 times higher than non-Jewish Labour Party members.”

The Jewish Chronicle has been at the forefront of the pro-Israel moral panic. The industry’s own kid glove in-house regulator IPSO has cited it for twenty-eight breaches of the editors’ code. It has incurred four major libel defeats, one of which was for “substantial damages” to Marc Wadsworth after a further subsequent smear was made against him. “According to Wadsworth, this is the fifteenth time in five years that the paper has had to retract or correct misinformation about him.”⁴¹

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Notes:

1. ↩ “Glossary for Understanding the Dismantling Structural Racism/Promoting Racial Equity Analysis,” Aspen Institute, accessed September 20, 2021.
2. ↩ “Chapter 28: Chicago Campaign,” Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, accessed September 20, 2021.
3. ↩ A. B. Spellman and Malcolm X, “Interview with Malcolm X,” Monthly Review 16, no. 1 (May 1964).
4. ↩ Allan R. Gold, “Boston Journal; Blacks and Jews Share a Night Like No Other,” New York Times, April 12, 1989.
5. ↩ Jodi Rudoren and Somini Sengupta, “U.N. Report on Gaza Finds Evidence of War Crimes by Israel and by Palestinian Militants,” New York Times, June 23, 2015; Marjorie Cohn, “One Year After Gaza Massacre, UN Exposes Likely War Crimes,” Huffington Post, July 9, 2015.
6. ↩ Judy Maltz, “ADL Slams Pro-BDS Jewish Group’s ‘Anti-Semitic’ New Video Campaign,” Haaretz, July 21, 2017; Andrew Pierce, “They Raised a Beetroot in the Air and Shouted F*** Capitalism,” Daily Mail, April 3, 2018; Rebecca Perring, “’F*** the Queen’ Vile Attack on Royals by Radical Group Behind Corbyn’s Passover Meal,” Express, April 4, 2018; “Jeremy Corbyn Faces Backlash Over Jewdas Event,” Daily Mail, April 3, 2018; Benjamin Weinthal, “Outrage Over German Institute’s Hosting of Pro-Hamas, Hezbollah Speaker,” Jerusalem Post, January 16, 2017; “Transcript: Norman Finkelstein,” Al Jazeera, April 8, 2015; Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Jews Can Be Anti-Semites Too!,” Israel National News; Justin Cohen, “Academic Quits Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Saying: ‘They’re Part of the Problem,’” Jewish News, June 1, 2016; “Action Urged After Jewish Activist ‘Levelled an Anti-Semitic Trope’ at JLM,” Jewish News, September 26, 2017; Rick Paulas, “Journalist Max Blumenthal on the Perils of Being an Anti-Zionist,” Vice, January 13, 2015; “Secretary of Jewish Voices for Labour Libelled as Anti-Semite,” Beastrabban (blog), March 9, 2018; “Jewish Man Suspended from Membership of Labour Party–for Anti-Semitism,” Vox Political, March 8, 2018; Asa Winstanley, “Labour Expels Jewish Anti-Zionist Tony Greenstein,” Electronic Intifada, February 21, 2018; “A JVL Statement on the Tony Greenstein Case,” Jewish Voice for Labour, November 26, 2017 Jewish Voice for Labour.
7. ↩ Giulio Meotti, “Mandela Was an Enemy of Israel,” Israel National News.
8. ↩ “Most of the legal team which helped Mandela avoid the death penalty at his treason trial were Jews. In fact, Mandela made Arthur Chaskalson, a Jewish member of his legal team at this trial, the first Chief Justice of post-apartheid South Africa. When the ANC decided to engage in armed resistance, the head of its military wing and its chief of military intelligence were both Jews—Joe Slovo (born Yossel Mashel Slovo) and Ronnie Kasrils respectively.” See Kenneth Surin, “Smearing Jeremy Corbyn,” CounterPunch, March 30, 2018; Richard Goldstone, “Nelson Mandela, Iconic Leader for Jews of South Africa—and World,” Forward, May 10, 2019.
9. ↩ “If Bishop Desmond Tutu Is an Anti-Semite—What Hope for the Rest of Us?,” Al Jazeera, January 14, 2011; Joshua Muravchik, “Facing Up to Black Anti-Semitism,” Commentary (December 1995); “ADL Denounces ‘Anti-Semitic’ Memorial in Harlem School for Malcolm X,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, February 26, 1968.
10. ↩ Asa Winstanley, “Labour Apparatchiks Smear Black Activist in ‘Anti-Semitism’ Witch Hunt,” Electronic Intifada, February 16, 2018. Here, Marc Wadsworth gives an interview about his contributions to the campaign strategy on the racist killing of Stephen Lawrence. See also, Ian Burrell and Paul Peachey, “How the Press Ignored the Lawrence Story—Then Used It to Change Britain,” Independent, January 4, 2012.
11. ↩ Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Can Ilhan Omar Overcome Her Prejudice?,” Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2019.
12. ↩ Glenn Greenwald, “CNN Submits to Right-Wing Outrage Mob, Fires Marc Lamont Hill Due to His ‘Offensive’ Defense of Palestinians at the U.N.,” Intercept, November 29, 2018.
13. ↩ Niraj Chokshi, “Angela Davis Says She’s ‘Stunned’ After Award Is Revoked Over Her Views on Israel,” New York Times, January 8, 2019; Joe Sterling, “Alabama Group Reverses Course, Wants to Honor Angela Davis,” CNN, January 25, 2019.
14. ↩ Max Blumenthal, “Censored Documentary Exposes Israel’s Attack on Black Lives Matter,” Black Agenda Report, September 12, 2018.
15. ↩ Jonathan Greenberg, “Black Lives Matter’s Hypocritical Anti-Semitism,” Washington Times, August 23, 2016; Emma Green, “Why Do Black Activists Care About Palestine?,” Atlantic, August 18, 2016; Alan Dershowitz, “‘Intersectionality’ Is a Code Word for Anti-Semitism,” Washington Examiner, March 30, 2017; Ben Sales, “Black Lives Matter Platform Author Defends Israel ‘Genocide’ Claim,” Times of Israel, August 10, 2016.
16. ↩ “Ms. Smeeth is former director of public affairs and campaigns at the British Israel Communications and Research Centre. She was named in U.S. diplomatic cables exposed by WikiLeaks as a source—marked ‘strictly protect’—of inside information on the Gordon Brown government.” Lamiat Sabin, “Marc Wadsworth Takes Labour to Court Over Expulsion,” Morning Star, February 22, 2019; Asa Winstanley, “UK Labour MP Ruth Smeeth Was Funded by Israel Lobby,” Electronic Intifada, December 6, 2016.
17. ↩ See Craig Murray, “Sanity, Shami Chakrabarti and the Ruth Smeeth Affair,” Craig Murray (blog), June 30, 2016.
18. ↩ Lizzie Dearden, “Jewish Labour MP Ruth Smeeth Leaves Antisemitism Event in Tears After Being Accused of ‘Colluding’ with Media,” Independent, June 30, 2016.
19. ↩ “Key Statistics and Quick Statistics for Local Authorities in the United Kingdom,” Office for National Statistics, October 11, 2013; David Graham, “Thinning and Thickening: Geographical Change in the UK’s Jewish Population, 2001–2011,” Institute for Jewish Policy Research, December 2013. Note: The 2011 census figure for British Jews is 0.5 percent, numbering 269,568 (this combines the figure from the England and Wales census with the published figures of Scotland). It seems that the percentage may have slightly fallen. The UK population is now currently 65.64 million. Based on these numbers, British Jews would be 0.41067641681901285 of the UK population.
20. ↩ “Fake Anti-Semitism: Local Labour Parties Move Against Wadsworth Expulsion,” Vox Political, June 10, 2018; Marc Wadsworth, “Police Cannot Rest on Their Laurels Over Jailings,” The-Latest, January 3, 2012; Stephen Lawrence, “The Media Impact,” BBC, February 19, 1999; “Stephen: The Murder That Changed a Nation,” BBC, accessed September 22, 2021; Brian Cathcart, “The Life and Legacy of Stephen Lawrence,” Independent, January 8, 2012; Ian Burrell and Paul Peachey, “How the Press Ignored the Lawrence Story–Then Used It to Change Britain,” Independent, January 4, 2012; Frances Rickford, “Trotskyists Blamed for Race Protest Violence: Militant Labour Accused Of Exploiting Revulsion Over Murders,” Independent, October 23, 2011.
    Marc Wadsworth, “McGrath’s Gaffe,” Guardian, June 23, 2008.
21. ↩ “One of the leading campaigners for the Lawrence family.” Kevin Ovenden, “Wadsworth’s Expulsion and the Contemptible Treachery of the Labour Right,” Morning Star, April 29, 2018.
22. ↩ Walker is supported here by a number of left-wing Jews who also criticize the right-wing Jewish Labour Movement. “Jewish Labour Activists in Defence of Jackie Walker,” Free Speech on Israel, September 29, 2016.
23. ↩ Ashley Cowburn, “Momentum Vice-Chair Jackie Walker Says Holocaust Memorial Day Is Not Inclusive Enough,” Independent, September 28, 2016.
24. ↩ Walker referred to slavery’s victims. The widely accepted figure supporting her complaint—60 million and more victims—features in Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved. It is also cited on Slavery Remembrance Day.
25. ↩ In a Jewish Chronicle article, Harriet Green wrote: “There’s a dark side to this…it is estimated 387,000 Africans were shipped to the island against their will. To be perfectly clear: the wealth of the island (and perhaps my forebears) was a direct result of appalling suffering.” (This was 2017, so within a year of the highpoint of the smears on Walker.) Harriet Green, “Seeking Ghosts in Barbados,”Jewish Chronicle, November 6, 2017.
26. ↩ Alison Stein Wellner, “Jewish Barbados? Tracking Down the Tribe in the Caribbean,” HuffPost, July 21, 2009. The story was then updated in 2011.
27. ↩ E. J. Dionne Jr., “Pope Apologizes to Africans for Slavery,” New York Times, August 14, 1985; Dennis Redmont, “Pope Apologizes for Church Role in Slave Trade,” AP News, June 6, 1992.
28. ↩ Stephen Bates, “Church Apologises for Benefiting from Slave Trade,” Guardian, February 9, 2006.
29. ↩ Tom Gjelten, “Southern Baptist Seminary Confronts History of Slaveholding and ‘Deep Racism,’” NPR, December 13, 2018.
30. ↩ “Some of my best friends are Jewish.” Jonathan Freedland, “The U.S. Will No Longer Feel Like a Haven for Jews Under Trump,” Guardian, November 16, 2016.
31. ↩ Howard Jacobson, “Jews Know What Antisemitism Is and What It Isn’t. To Invent It Would Be a Sacrilege,” Guardian, April 7, 2018.
32. ↩ Elspeth Knights and Clare Morley, “Antisemitism and Criticism of Israel,” Guardian, April 13, 2018.
33. ↩ “Walker told Al Jazeera that at one point during the Labour Party conference, the chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, Jeremy Newmark, allegedly called her a ‘court Jew.’” He subsequently denied this. “Israel Lobby: Anti-Semitism Battle in UK Labour Party,” Al Jazeera, January 13, 2017.
34. ↩ The judge in the Fraser v. University and College Union case condemned Newmark’s testimony, saying: “One painfully ill-judged example of playing to the gallery was Mr. Newmark’s preposterous claim, in answer to the suggestion in cross-examination that he had attempted to push his way into the 2008 meeting, that a ‘pushy Jew’ stereotype was being applied to him.” Laura Stuart, “My Voice Has Been Silenced and I’ve Lost Faith in Mainstream Activism,” 5Pillars, December 22, 2017.
35. ↩ “Baddiel’s Holocaust Denial Doco Has Questionable Timing and a Dodgy Presenter,” Vox Political, February 14, 2020.
36. ↩ Joe Moore, “Ex-Nottingham Forest Striker Jason Lee on David Baddiel and Frank Skinner Fantasy Football Abuse That Went ‘Too Far,’” Talk Spot, May 22, 2020.
37. ↩ Jason Lee admitted that his family suffered from these incitements at soccer grounds. “They were very defensive about it,” said Lee, who now works in equalities and education for the PFA. “In the end, I would tell them not to come. It can’t be nice, supporting your child or partner and seeing him get so much abuse.… It was, looking back, a form of bullying.” Sarah Clapson, “‘For More Than a Year I Kept It Out of Defiance’—Former Nottingham Forest Striker Jason Lee on His ‘Pineapple’ Hairstyle,” Nottingham Post, September 26, 2018.
    “You’re talking about ethnicity, a lot of black people would wear dreadlocks and feel deeply offended by someone who’s getting mocked for a similar hairstyle. The implications were far wider, and it wouldn’t happen today.” “Jason Lee Still Wants Apology from Baddiel and Skinner for Comedy Sketches,” Mirror, June 29 2020.
    Professor Ben Carrington described the copycat effect of Baddiel’s incitements. “David Baddiel ‘Blacked up’ (evoking the barely coded racist imagery of the minstrel shows) with a pineapple on his head out of which Jason Lee’s dreadlocks were growing—the ‘joke’ being that Jason Lee’s ‘dreads’ resemble a fruit on top of his head. This joke was then carried out with increasing frequency for the rest of the series, with young children sending in drawings of Jason Lee adorned with various fruit on his head. The pineapple joke was then taken up by football fans in the terraces who chanted songs about Jason Lee’s hair and significantly transcended the normally insular world of football fandom and entered into the public domain as both a descriptive term and a form of ridicule (‘Pineapple Head’) for any black person with dreads tied back.” Ben Carrington, “‘Football’s Coming Home’ but Whose Home? And Do We Want It?,” in Fanatics!: Power, Identity and Fandom in Football, ed. Adam Brown (London: Routledge, 1998).
38. ↩ Amanda Erickson, “British Mogul Alan Sugar Sent a Racist Tweet About Senegal’s World Cup Team,” Washington Post, June 20, 2018; Daniel Mumbere , “BBC Presenter Called Out for ‘Racist’ World Cup Tweet Against Senegal,” Africa News, June 21, 2018; “Lord Alan Sugar Racist Tweet Compares Senegal Footballers to Marbella Beach Sellers,” Albawaba, June 21, 2018. Sections of the UK media also reflected the demand that Sugar be sacked by the BBC. See Eleanor Rose, “Alan Sugar Tweet: Sports Adviser to Senegal President Calls for ‘Ignorant’ Lord Sugar to Be Fired for ‘Racist’ Post,” Evening Standard, June 22, 2018; Tom Embury-Dennis, “Alan Sugar Should Be Fired by BBC for ‘Racist’ World Cup Tweet, Senegal Presidential Adviser Says,” Independent, June 22, 2018.
39. ↩ Forbes occasionally still cites it: “Almost 30 years ago Conservative government minister Norman Tebbit said: ‘A large proportion of Britain’s Asian population fail to pass the cricket test. Which side do they cheer for? It’s an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from or where you are?’ He later added that some immigrant communities would not assimilate ‘because some of them insist on sticking to their own culture, like the Muslims in Bradford and so forth, and they are extremely dangerous.’” Steve Busfield, “England’s Cricket World Cup Feelgood Factor Must Face TV And Tebbit Tests,” Forbes, July 17, 2019.
    Marxist critic Alex Callinicos summarized: “As Tebbit demanded of Black people when he proposed his ‘cricket test,’ which amounted to insisting that, if they want to be regarded as British, they must, in effect, break all connections with the countries from which they or their ancestors emigrated and assimilate to the dominant culture—a test which he assumed most would fail.” Alex Callinicos, “Race and Class,” International Socialism 2, no. 55 (summer 1992): 3–39.
    See also: John Bingham, “Minorities Must ‘Pass the Norman Tebbit Test’—Chief Rabbi,” Telegraph, March 9 2016; Hana Levi Julian, “UK Chief Rabbi Advises Muslims to Copy Jewish Show of Obedience,” Jewish Press, March 10, 2016.
40. ↩ “Resolutions, Statements and Quotes in Support of Chris Williamson MP,” Labour Against the Witch Hunt, October 20, 2019.
41. ↩ “Labour Is Purging Jews–We Are the ‘Wrong Kind’ of Jews,” Jewish Voice for Labour, August 14, 2021; “Call to Investigate the Jewish Chronicle for ‘Serious and Systemic Breaches’ of Code,” Jewish Voice for Labour, August 3, 2021; “Jewish Chronicle Pays Damages and Apologises in Open Court to Wadsworth for Smears,” Skwawkbox, July 22, 2021.